Local data is essential to understand the effectiveness of weather prediction and early-warning system. Citizen science plays a potential role in filling gaps through contributing local data and providing authorities and scientists with additional observations and ground truth to assess warnings. The term – citizen science can be defined as the type of science in which the public can participate in producing scientific knowledge in collaboration with professional scientists and scientific institutions. Co-creation of knowledge, credibility, the quality of scientific evidence and decision making requires to be clarified for enhancing the evaluation of the effectiveness of early-warning systems and understanding the power struggle between public and professionals in the decision-making process.
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Dear Kyaw,
A very relevant topic that you are touching, and in particular interesting to me personally, being involved in Tsunami early warning. But that aside, I would encourage you to not only focus on the flooding early warning aspect, but take this as an example of what citizen science is capable of achieving. Then generalize to climate change mitigation. Early warning is – fortunately for early warning but unfortunately for climate mitigation – much easier, since it is sudden, personally affecting, and in many cases repeating. Climate change, however, is slow, almost unnoticable unless it unfolds but the ireversible and staying.
So, I would go with Leonie’s comment in that it is very interesting to investigate the influence of citizen science on credibility, trust, and possibly agency to tackle external threats and then generalize this to the climate change mitigation, considering the different situation.
Good success with your poster!
Kyaw, your question around how citizen science can help tackle climate change, and a flood warning System specifically, is very relevant to our overarching question. I am curious to see your results and understand the potential of citizen science. I would find it interesting to clarify how citizen science enhances the value of the flood warning system in particular – beyond filling data gaps. You could explore how community participation improves trust in warning systems, lowers response times or builds community resilience. You could focus on one of these perspectives or touch on all of them. The power dynamics in decision making that you are mentioning in the last sentence seem to be worthwhile taking into account – perhaps you could give some examples to make it more tangible to the reader?